Every Secret Thing won the 2008 David Unaipon Award, the annual competition for unpublished manuscripts by indigenous writers. This published version won the 2010 Northern Territory Book of the Year award. Munkara, who as a small child lived on Bathurst Island, balances competing moods with aplomb. Her narrative is rich with irony, but the stories of clashing, melding cultures are anchored by melancholy and exasperation. While Munkara occasionally pushes a political point, adding a sentence or two of superfluous, didactic commentary, there is little earnestness.

The most striking and persistent theme is the hypocrisy of the priests and nuns – the jarring discord between their principles and their actions. If they seem a hapless lot, it is because they are experts in wishful thinking who persistently assume that the Aborigines are dim-witted. Brother Michael can’t imagine where his missing livestock goes; Sister Annunciata can’t abide insolence but is forever surrounded by it. They bicker among themselves, pursue their carnal urges and ponder dubious ideas, including Father Macredie’s theory ‘that black men had black sperm (hence black babies) and white men had white sperm (hence white babies)’. They pray indiscriminately: Father Macredie asks God to make sure Brother Neil’s brass band is a passing phase, while Brother Wayne spends ‘years on his knees’ pleading to be rid of Brother Brian.

Some of the white characters can seem a little cartoonish, including the young lay missionaries Andrew and Mabel McKenzie, and the dirty but capable Dr Phil and his wife, ‘braless Betty’. But while Munkara pokes relentless fun at the priests and nuns, she also presents them as people with very human flaws, foibles and redeeming qualities. There is Brother Neil, a bully whose fears overwhelm him, Brother Brian, who leaves his money to the Communist Party instead of to the church, and Brother Angus, who takes the mission truck under false pretences so he can go camping with his Aboriginal friends: ‘Considering he was one of the mission mob, he was pretty alright.’ Perhaps most compelling is Sister Annunciata, her harsh persona stripped back to reveal a woman straitjacketed by an impulsive decision decades ago.

Munkara’s Aboriginal characters find myriad ways to resist and adapt to their ever-changing circumstances. Brother Michael’s ‘faithful helpers’, Augustine and Methuselah, help themselves to the mission’s chickens and pigs, and are expert at appearing not to ‘know their arse from their elbows’. Pwomiga goes further, feeding vivid fictions to Dr Colvin Curry, a visiting anthropologist. Curry learns such useful phrases as ‘Awana juruliwa’ – or, ‘Hello, pubic hair’ – while Pwomiga moves on to translating the Mass and hymns for Father Macredie.

Perhaps the life story that resonates most powerfully in Every Secret Thing is that of Tapalinga. She arrives on the mission as a child, but because she has a white father she has the mission’s attention: ‘as with all the coloured kids before her, they left her alone just long enough for everyone to get really attached to her and marvel at her new words and her cheeky smile and all the precious little things she did.’ The church takes Tapalinga from her mother and sends her to the Garden of Eden, a separate mission on another island for mixed race children. Soon, she is on the mainland (‘the Big Joint’): ‘she journeyed from one family to the next, unable to fulfil their expectations because her seven-year-old arms mopped the floor too slowly or her nine-year-old hands didn’t wash the clothes properly or she took her floggings with a defiance that spelt trouble.’ Years later, Tapalinga – now called Marigold – returns to the island. Her confusion as she attempts to understand a place now foreign to her and to reconnect with her mother is poignant and confronting.

If Tapalinga’s predicament is one of Every Secret Thing’s most riveting moments, her story also seems an abbreviated version of something potentially much fuller and more complex. This is symptomatic of Every Secret Thing’s ensemble nature. While Munkara successfully bounces from character to character, sometimes there is a sense that in doing so she leaves much unexplored. Nevertheless, this is an important and entertaining book. It ends when Pwomiga (rechristened Joseph) decides it is time to learn the ‘trick’ of resurrection. As he sets his plan in motion, Munkara’s prose transforms into a stunning coda, a searing and desperately sad lament about mission life and its destructive consequences.